Monday, 2 November 2015

A Halloween lunch with a watermelon monster

In our house, Halloween is a time when death is uppermost in our minds. We held a lunch yesterday, as we do each year, to remember the day that our twin boys, Alex and Ian were stillborn. It used to be a quieter affair but their younger sister now treats it as another birthday party. And Halloween is becoming the theme each year. Sylvia loves the fun food and so would her brothers.

When we decided to make broomsticks with pretzels, it seemed a good opportunity to revisit the white chocolate and pretzel spider webs we made a few years back. The ones we made back then had dodgy chocolate spiders in the middle and really wobbly webs. Sylvia jumped at the suggestion. She even had a go at piping the chocolate webs. As you can see above we had mixed results.

Some of the webs were far better and I have been able to include an updated photo on the original post. However we had a problem with the chocolate not setting. It set in the fridge or freezer but not at room temperature. So I left them in the freezer overnight (the fridge being too full). Sylvia decided to take them out this morning. I had balanced them carefully but a 6 year old was not to know this.

When she opened the door they fell out and shattered all over the kitchen floor. We were able to rescue and snack on a few pieces but most of it ended up in the bin. I was a bit sad but the white chocolate is so sweet that perhaps it was for the best to admire but not eat too much.

We were busy tidying the house and cooking leading up to the lunch. The roses in the garden are all beyond their best. Sylvia was keen to find some flowers. We managed to pick a few that were less overblown then the rest.

Sylvia was very keen that we made cheese and pretzel broomsticks like last year. I had memories of making them by wrapping swiss cheese around a pretzel and tying it with a spring onion. It was fiddly. This year we found the string cheese that other people have used and it was so easy that I was able to leave Sylvia to do it without supervision. We did leave out the little detail of the chive or spring onion tied around it but there was much else to do. The string cheese was much easier but I think we all preferred the taste of the swiss cheese to the plastic stuff.

E was quite keen on a jack o lantern themed food. I had chickpeas leftover from using aqua faba (more on that later) and decided to make pumpkin dip. I served it in a ramekin with a face cut out of nori. (Those with a keen attention to detail might notice that I forgot the nose.)

One of the dishes I was most excited by was the watermelon monster. I was originally inspired on pinterest. I bought an 8kg watermelon the day before and was quite proud of it. Sylvia was fascinated. Unfortunately it was really too heavy for her. So when she picked it up to cradle it like a baby she dropped it. The watermelon split and bled on my rug. Boo hoo!

I am not a huge fan of watermelon and only bought so much watermelon just for the fun of doing the monster. So it seemed like a waste. I put the huge watermelon in the fridge, shuffling lots of food around to fit it.

I avoided the huge cracked watermelon in the fridge as long as I could. Once I took it out and gave it a searching look, I discovered I had been unduly pessimistic. No, my watermelon would not look just like the picture but it would do very nicely as a scary monster with lime halves and dried cranberries attached with a toothpick for eyes. In the end it was very simple and looked impressive.

As I made the monster it at the end, I only chopped up some pineapple to go with the watermelon despite having other fruit to include. The kids loved having the watermelon and were not at all deterred by the proper black pips. (I bought it at a local fruit and veg shop rather than the supermarket that had no watermelon on the day and usually sell the anaemic type with not much in the way of pips or colour.) I gave some to my mum and plan to make juice with a lot of the rest.

I was just finishing making the watermelon monster when my parents and a couple of Sylvia's friends and their families arrived. We had lots of crudites, swiss cheese, bikkies and chips to serve with the pumpkin hummus and broomsticks. I also made spider web pizza and ghost cupcakes. These last two both deserve their own post. I will be back with more Halloween fun soon.

Johanna it seems we are very similar with the cooking successes and disasters, I dropped a container of medjools the other day and was only able to save a few. Gosh I would have been "devo" at my spider webs falling out of the freezer! My watermelon story would have been the same too had I bought a watermelon to make a Minion (thank you pinterest)! I remember your Halloween food last year! I didn't make a single thing this year as I was just feeling so over having to cook and do stuff-- I figure we can have Halloween food some other time (so much for my big Halloween blog post I had planned... just ran out of puff!) [hope this goes through, i'm having some troubles with commenting on blogspot blogs again]

Thanks Faye - I have seen the minion watermelon - so many great watermelon shapes to try but I think this seemed one of the easiest! I wasn't so fussed about the spiders webs as they seemed so sweet and I was worried they would just melt into goo on a plate once out of the fridge - don't remember this being a problem last time but we probably made less and ate them quicker. I don't think we would do so much halloween food if not for Alex and Ian's birthday being the day after and it is nice for sylvia to have a celebration that is fun for her!

I am sure Alex and Ian would love this food and the Halloween style celebrations for their birthday. I think it's wonderful that you've helped Sylvia grow up keeping the memory of her older brothers alive. I also like that you have been very matter of fact and seemingly accepting of the amount of dropped produce! The watermelon monster certainly came out without any evidence of mishap and looks brilliant.

Thanks Kari - I think having a lunch for Alex and Ian each year makes them an important part of Sylvia's life but we go in and out of phases of talking about them. I would like to say I wasn't at all upset with the dropped watermelon - I was gutted and immediately cross at sylvia and myself but I did have to remind myself that it was an accident - she is not used to picking up 8kg pieces of fruit and knowing that it is too heavy for her - it was fun for a moment til she dropped it :-)

You've gone so far beyond the old orange-tinted foods and faces made out of raisins that were the only Halloween efforts when I was a child. But then, the whole holiday is so much more popular and looks so much larger now.

Your memorial to the two boys seems both sad and optimistic. Above all, your daughter won't see it as a painful secret, which seems to happen in some families.

Thanks Mae - Indeed remembering the boys is both sad and happy and so is full of confusion. But I agree that it is important for Sylvia to know about them. And I think the days of orange tinted food with raisins for faces are innocent days when no one had the one upmanship of the internet!

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Recipes and reflections in which our vegetarian heroine dreams of being tall and graceful as a giraffe; being a goddess in the kitchen; and being gladdened by green gadgets, green food and green politics because green is the colour of hope. See About Me for more info.